OMG 26: Our Mini Games Review

OMG, another Internet slang has been turned into a game title.

Game publisher UFO is quickly establishing itself as a company that's poking around the Japanese gaming market for the weird and unusual Nintendo DS games, scooping them up and applying a basic translation to them before releasing them on the US public. OMG 26 -- Our Mini Games is the company's latest import acquisition, a quirky Wario Ware-esque game that has some charm but ultimately ends up as a half-hour of DS touchscreen concepts that really don't go anywhere.

The title doesn't really match the game's theme. Oh, those wacky guys at UFO snagged the l33t speak before anyone else could (hey, D3 got to WTF first with its PlayStation Portable mini-game collection), but other than the forced meaning "Our Mini Games," and the game's use of mini-games, the whole OMG doesn't really work with the "haunted house" presentation. Basically, you're three anime dudes in a mansion and need to succeed in challenges to move from one floor of the house to the next. Get to the end, you might snag a treasure waiting for you.

OMG is, essentially, a short and sweet mini-game compilation, more along the lines of what Namco did with Point Blank than what Nintendo's popularized with its Wario Ware franchise. Each game design uses the Nintendo DS touch screen, from tracing a key pattern as quickly as possible, to sorting different colored bats into their proper cages. Some feature flicking mechanics, like trying to get marbles into a circle on the upper screen. Some feature rapid fire tapping, like the burger challenge where you need to clear dozens of sandwiches off the touchscreen so you can attack an enemy. None are great, but none are particularly awful either.

Yep, there are slidepuzzles.

The biggest oddity about OMG is the fact that even if you fail, you move on. You can pretty much plow through the game without winning a challenge. Lose a mini-game, you "successfully" work through the mansion. However, once you get to the end, if you haven't completed the games successfully, you won't get the "treasure." But you at least escape the mansion.

It's a very short experience with no real replay value aside from trying to conquer each of the 26 mini-games. Once the games have been unlocked you can play them outside of the usual level progression and try to secure the best rank: S. Strange, though, you select the rank BEFORE the game begins, and if you beat the challenge you get the rank and even more strange, if you get an S rank, it doesn't award the lower ranks. Clearly the S rank means you've mastered it, but the game still requires you to get the lower ranks before you've successfully conquered it.

The Verdict

OMG 26: Our Mini Games is the perfect example of a shelf-filler. There's nothing spectacular or original or special about the title, but it's not particularly awful, either. It's just one of those games that simply exists in the realm of meh.